Have You Played… Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

There aren’t enough games with manuals any more. The smell of a new game’s glossy information booklet is a sensation lost to the ages. But Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes joins the Zachlikes of this world in keeping this tradition alive, even if it means printing out your own manual. It’s a co-op game of disarming bombs and shouting furious nonsense at your partner. It’s brilliant.I fear many people dismissed it as gimmicky, and I can see why it gives that impression. But the set-up is so perfect that it deserves re-recommending. One person has only the manual, the other person only has a screen with a ticking time-bomb. I played it with my girlfriend, who fell into the habit of deconstructing each stage of her directions into specialist words and shortcut phrases, as I dutifully clipped away at wires and toggled switches. Like any good party game, it’s a test of communication, logical inference and understanding.